How Our Small Church Reached About 100 First-Time Visitors

People are looking. They just aren't finding us.

Most people who visit a church for the first time look it up online first. They search "church near me," scroll past a Facebook ad, or tap through a website on their phone before they ever walk through the door.

At Riverview Church in Anoka, Minnesota, we knew that. We just couldn't afford to do much about it. Like a lot of small churches, we had a website that looked fine to us, a Facebook page we posted on when we remembered, and no real plan for reaching the people around us.

So I tried something different. Over the next three or four months, roughly 100 first-time guests came through our doors. Here's what we did, what it cost, and what I'd tell any pastor of a small church who wants to reach their neighbors.

What “about 100 visitors” means

We counted the old-fashioned way: a head count at our Sunday services of the new comers. (They were kind of hard not to notice!) However, keep in mind, this is an approximate number, not a figure pulled from a dashboard. And in some ways, that fact actually makes the result even more powerful, because we personally spoke with them.

We also know where they came from: our brand new Plan Your Visit Facebook campaign. And roughly 25 to 30 of them have come back for a second visit or more. Of course, your church’s results may vary from ours. But we encourage others: just keep it up, and watch what God can do with your faithfulness.

In any case, what I’d encourage you to do is track three numbers separately: people who respond online, people who actually show up, and people who come back. A cheap contact is encouraging, but it isn’t a guest until they walk through the door. That's the magic moment!

We ran ads aimed at our own neighbors

For a while we paid a church marketing agency to handle this for us. Between their monthly fee and the ad budget itself, churches like ours can easily spend $1,000 to $2,000 a month. For a small congregation, that's a staff salary.

So I took it in-house. I learned to run our own Google and Facebook ads, and we launched a "Plan Your Visit" campaign aimed at people living near the church. The ad didn't preach. It simply invited people to come see us, and it let them say they were interested with a short form, right inside Facebook.

The biggest surprise was how little it cost. Some of our campaigns brought in a new contact for about $7 to $10. For a church, that's someone who raised their hand and said, "I might come this Sunday."

Follow-up is the part most churches miss

An ad gets someone's name. Follow-up gets them through the door, and then gets them back a second time.

When someone filled out our form, they got a friendly text from the church within minutes, and our team was notified so a real person could reach out. Later we built the same kind of follow-up for people who filled out a serve card: a short series of texts and emails, written in my own voice, that walked them toward a team.

This is where most small churches lose people. Not because they don't care, but because a connect card lands on a pile and the week gets busy. Automated follow-up doesn't replace a personal touch. It makes sure the personal touch actually happens.

What it cost, and what we learned

Our biggest savings came from not paying someone else to manage it. The ads themselves were affordable. What churches really pay for is the management.

A few lessons stood out:

• Invite, don't sell. A warm, simple invitation to "plan your visit" worked better than anything clever.
• Speed matters. A text within minutes feels like hospitality. A call three days later feels like a sales pitch.
• Small budgets work. You don't need thousands of dollars a month to reach your town. You need consistency and good follow-up.
• Your website has to pull its weight. If someone clicks an ad and finds a site with no service times, you've paid to lose them.

The catch was time. Setting all of this up meant learning ad platforms, automation tools, and texting rules on top of pastoring a church. Most pastors don't have that time, and they shouldn't have to.

Why we built Shepherd Station

Shepherd Station is everything we built at Riverview, put into one place so other pastors don't have to piece it together themselves.

A church can launch a Facebook campaign with one button, run Google ads, and have a website that's actually built to be found. Follow-up texts and emails for guests, prayer requests, serve cards, giving, and baptisms come ready to go from day one. It's designed for a pastor or a small staff to run on their own, at a fraction of what an agency costs.

Right now I'm opening Shepherd Station to a small group of founding pastors. I'll personally walk each one through setup, and their feedback will shape what we build next. If you pastor a church of roughly 30 to 300 people and want to reach your community without the agency price tag, I'd love to talk.

Pastor Ben Fischer leads Riverview Church in Anoka, Minnesota, and is the founder of Shepherd Station.